When you’re travelling, you visit new places and meet sometimes the most weirdest people. You try out peculiar food and listen to music that you don’t understand at all. It might be that you’re having pizza in Ho Chi Minh City with a local university student. But then, he tells you that it’s the first time he’s having pizza. You’ll most certainly then talk about food. And eventually, you’ll both end up with new recipes.

This is called knowledge sharing. You perhaps gave a pizza recipe to the local student and he gave you a family noodle recipe. This is how we learn from other people: by sharing knowledge.

However, there’s another side to sharing knowledge, and that’s creating knowledge. But, creating new knowledge is only possible when learning is reciprocal. This is because, if a person shares knowledge to another, only the other learns. In fact, this is common in classrooms where the teacher shares knowledge in a monologue style and doesn’t receive much back.

Now, to make new knowledge creation possible, we need to insert discussion and interaction. This contributes to making learning reciprocal. One example of inserting discussion and interaction in a classroom, is by changing the room layout to a round-table format. This would facilitate interaction – with such reasoning as diminished power positions and higher chances of accessing a flow state.

Just like with the pizza story in Ho Chi Minh, sharing and knowledge creation needs a common thread of enquiry. In our games we drive this enquiry through powerful questions that tune people in the same wavelength. (Most of our questions are not about pizza, in case you were wondering) In addition, our serious games, be it the board game or tailor-made gamified experiences, address learning as a reciprocal activity. It’s fundamentally so, because normally the players – executives, entrepreneurs, managers, consultants – have vast knowledge and life experience banks which make each player a teacher.

When we play a serious game, learning happens by sharing with other players. Here’s an example of how this happens during a serious board game. A question comes from the game, a person puts forth his ideas and another player gains an insight from it. And this is where the magic happens, he builds on top of the other player’s idea and bounces it back. The players bounce back and forth their ideas because it’s part of the game to contribute. A third person might build on top of that and so forth. And so we have built – created – new knowledge.

Sharing with other players has its other, besides creating new knowledge, benefits. Like that it builds trust and happiness from the enjoyment of giving and taking. If you are more into finding how sharing with others helps you to become successful, we suggest you read Adam Grant’s book “Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success”.

To round it up, it’s important to share knowledge, but it’s even more important to build on top of people’s knowledge. Do this by giving your perspective on the shared knowledge and you’ll be on your way to creating new knowledge. To make this possible in a wider environment, you ought to facilitate discussion and interaction.A couple possibilities for this are, for instance, changing room layouts and playing serious games.

Before going to dive in the actual sea during your first scuba diving course, you traditionally jump into a swimming pool with the dive gear and your instructor. Now, you go to the pool because you’ll want to test the gear. You want to do so because, perhaps, you are sceptic about the dive gear – “Can I really breathe underwater?”, but most of all because you are not familiar with scuba diving. You want to take the risk that’s involved with diving, but you’ll want to first do it with reduced consequences. There’s no waves, currents nor salty water in the pool. There’s no spiky corals nor poisonous creatures. There’s no visibility issues or depth- nor decompression limits. When you’re in the pool, all you need to do is stand up and you’ll be on dry land.

Serious games for business are what swimming pools are to scuba diving: platforms for taking risks with reduced consequences.

So, how do serious games allow us to take risks with reduced consequences?

In its simplicity, serious games provide a unique setup for personal expression – the essence of creativity and innovation. Serious games allow us to mitigate consequences there is in bringing forth, developing and choosing ideas in brainstorming, leadership and project meetings. In practise, this means you’ll be able to come up with more ideas. You’ll also be able to develop the ideas further with co-creation. In addition, you’ll be able to inspect and reflect more on the ideas with dialogue that surrounds the questions. As an end product, you’ll receive insights to solve and further develop your issue.

Now, why do serious games allow us to do this?

Gathering around a board game is like gathering around a campfire, you start telling the most imaginative stories. This is largely due to psychological safety. The idea behind psychological safety is that you are allowed to initiate without permission, and even if the action leads to a failure, you will not be, for instance, fired.

This idea that psychological safety is the #1 biggest contributor to innovation might sound silly. However, Google has done significant research about the characteristics of the world’s most innovative teams. The research gives the number one spot for making the difference in innovative teams to psychological safety. (You can check the other elements here.)

“Psychological safety is the biggest distinction in innovative teams.”

–Frederik Pferdt, Google Chief Innovation Evangelist

And, what does that have to do with serious games?

Well, the purpose of our games is to drive learning. And, if your mindset is set for learning, you can inspect and act a little more from a bird-eye perspective. This means that things are not personal. Thus, and since we are looking matters from a 3rd perspective – objective point of view -, we see ourselves and others as equal. This subsidises to psychological safety and ultimately allows us to contribute more.And, what does that have to do with serious games?

Further, our games are engaging by design. There’s elements of play and simulation. And, to borrow from our definition of play “being captured by flow in a creative and joyful act which is governed by fixed or thought rules “, we access a state that makes us both present, creative and joyful. This makes us the beforementioned, however it is the idea that actions don’t make an impact outside the room that removes failure from the equation. In other words, to play is taking risks with reduced consequences.

Serious games make a space that supports learning, removes boundaries between people, is engaging and simulating – and even encouraging. By so, serious games are what swimming pools are to scuba diving: platforms for taking risks with reduced consequences.

Be it from selling scuba diving on a beach in the Philippines as a 22-year-old-baby-face to pitching ideas at an entrepreneurship community, relating past experiences, be it mine or someone else’s, to my current context has helped me to see other perspectives.This has helped me to understand more and see a bigger picture. And ultimately, I’ve been able to make better decisions.

But, how do you, in practice, connect these experiences to your current context? Do you just have that apple drop on your head and puff you’ve had the insight?

You are right. There’s better ways. For one, mentoring, for another, serious games. There’s a reason for this. Mentoring and serious games allow us to connect the dots because they are both mindfully engaging.

This means that we embrace a learning mindset where mistakes and successes are opportunities – experiences – to learn from. Being mindfully engaged means to be pondering ifs and whys; about if this would have been the case, then what would have happened, and why it happened. As an example, a mentor presents tough questions that allow reflection. Mentors also share their point of view and insights from their experience. This allows the mentee to reflect on his context from a different perspective, which then improves the mentee’s ability to connect the dots, the experiences together. Similarly, our serious games bring forth dozens of difficult questions and reflection and insights from all the experiences of the players. This discussion and collaboration allows the players to connect those dots and makes reflection exponential.

Life teaches, goes an old proverb, however what life really does is give us something to learn from: experience. And, when you share an experience, the listeners gain new perspectives. By reason, sharing and gaining perspectives allows us to reflect on how other people see the world. Just like I’ve reflected on my experiences and gained new insights, when a question is presented during a serious game the players share their experiences and elaborate how they perceive the matter and build on top of each other. This way, the players create an exponential amount of new perspectives. And this is where the value lies. During a serious game, you create new knowledge by sharing perspectives. For this reason, serious games bring acquiring new perspectives and reflection to a new level. And ultimately, improves the player’s decision making.

Games, like most systems, can be designed to serve different kinds of ends. While some are purely meant for entertainment, some might be designed to sell things or to lose weight. Our interest lies in increasing the impact of learning.

The reason why games are a great vehicle for learning is that games are engaging experiences. In an engaging experience, the players produce dopamine, the hormone that will encourage us to explore and try new things – to learn and innovate, to phrase it differently.

We had a chat this week with our team about how this happens and what we know about learning in our business games. Here’s a TOP 10 list infographic of our findings. Enjoy!

P.S. If you have similar (or different) experiences, we would love to hear from you. Let us know if this resonates with you and how have you learned while playing (business) games?